Independence
by frazzledsoul
Summary: Luke and Lorelai celebrate Independence Day with the youngest member of their family and ponder their changing circumstances. Takes place in the timeline of The Grandparents.


_Okay, so this story has been in the works for a while now. Originally it was going to be about Lorelai's birthday, then it was Mother's Day, and now it's the Fourth of July and here we are._

 _This is a fast-forward for The Grandparents. I haven't touched that story for a while, and part of it has to do with the fact that as time goes by I'm becoming increasingly unhappy with the way that AYITL ended. I'm hoping to restore some of the optimism I formally had about the revival to continue writing what started out as a positive fic, but in a lot of respects I'm struggling with it right now. This story is mostly me trying to be okay with it again._

 _Warning: this story included an extended discussion of Rory's love triangle. I am not permanently picking a team here, but I am speculating about how things might have developed at this point in time. So don't be dismayed if you ship either side!_

 _As always, any reviews or comments are appreciated._

Richard Lucas Gilmore's second Independence Day celebration was turning out to be a lot better than his first.

For one thing, he was actually awake for it.

Rory's pregnancy had stretched a week and a half past its original due date, leading to the delivery of her squalling bundle of joy on a humid June morning after fifteen hours of labor. It had both been more and less difficult than Lorelai had anticipated. There were no grand complications, but Rory had been stretched way past her breaking point. Lorelai had worried about her daughter's ability to be as dedicated to motherhood as she had planned to be, especially since the book project she had been working on feverishly for months was only half finished by the time her grandson made his entrance into the world.

Her worries on that front had mostly turned out to be baseless. Rory had thrown herself into motherhood with an intensity she had once dedicated to school and to work, and Lorelai hadn't even felt half as needed as she thought she would be. She and Luke had been left to their own devices for the holiday celebration, and Rory had quickly consumed the watermelon pie that they brought home from the diner before retiring for an early night in.

Rory had mostly kept to that routine in the first few weeks, but an unexpected collapse at the town's Eclipse festival had caused her to depend on her parents a bit more, especially as she got closer and closer to finishing the book. Jess and April had taken to spending more and more time at the house, and Logan had quickly developed a friendship with both of them. The new arrival in their lives had solidified them as a surprisingly functional family unit, and even the new developments in Rory's romantic life hadn't changed that bond much at all.

This time around, Luke and Lorelai were on grandparent duty. Rory's book had finally been published last month by Jess's book press, and they had departed for a week-long promotional tour. Rick was now old enough to babble and toddle, and he had spent most of the past few days roaming around the diner and the Dragonfly's two locations. She and Luke planned to depart for their semi-isolated cabin on Lake Lillinonah the next day where they would meet up with April, Rory, Jess, and Logan before Rory would take the baby back to Logan's apartment in Manhattan.

Rory and Rick's return date to Stars Hollow was undetermined at this point.

So Luke and Lorelai treasured their time with their grandson while they still had it, and gave him the run of yet another zany town festival. At (almost) thirteen months, Rick often displayed a mixture of his mother's quiet curiosity and his father's devil-may-care attitude. He had refused to sit still during the town baseball game and had only become distracted once Luke had carried him out to the empty space beyond the dugout and let him catch and toss the ball himself. (Lorelai's heart had absolutely fluttered at the sight, and she was once again eternally thankful that she had a husband eager to share a pastime she was still utterly clueless at). The baby had shown more enthusiasm for face-painting and had happily squealed in joy throughout the entirety of the town's obligatory patriotic parade. Fireworks were for the most part outlawed in Connecticut and Stas Hollow was too small for their own fireworks display, so the evening had ended in a full-costume (if historically inaccurate) signing of the Declaration of Independence. Rick fell asleep in the middle of it, so Luke and Lorelai retreated to the safety of their own home to put him to bed and enjoy a few quiet moments on the porch.

"Rory's moving on," Lorelai mused later as she sat curled up next to him, his hand distractedly weaving through her curls. She put down the last of the blueberry mojito she had swiped from the inn earlier that day and laid her head on his shoulder.

"That's good, right?" Luke asked, continuing to thread his fingers through her hair.

"I don't know," Lorelai replied. "Maybe it's good. Maybe it's not."

"We both knew she wouldn't stay in Stars Hollow forever," Luke pointed out as Lorelai lifted her head up to look at him.

"I know," Lorelai told him. "I've gotten so used to having her and the kid around, though. It's been so long since she was even in the same country as us, and it was nice having her right across town whenever I wanted to see her, or she needed to see me. And as much as I would have not wanted to admit this a year ago, I actually like being a grandmother."

Luke smiled and kissed her temple softly. He relished his new role in life as a grandparent just as much as she did, but it was still relatively rare for her to use the word to describe herself without being prompted.

"We're still grandparents," he assured her. "That isn't changing."

Lorelai leaned back against him and lapsed into silence once more.

"He made everything better, Luke," she said a few moments later. "Not that it wasn't great before between us or that I didn't like our life, because I did. But he brought us closer together and made us more of a real family. Not just you and me, but you and me and April and Rory and Rick and even Jess. We didn't have that before he came along. At least not the way that we do now."

"I don't think any of that is going away," Luke told her. "Rory and April didn't really know each other before, and Jess – well, he had his own reasons for coming here once Rory moved back. I don't think any of that is going away. We're still a family, Lorelai."

Lorelai smiled and threaded her fingers within his. "Do you think you would thought of all of us that way a few years ago?"

"Probably," Luke contended. "But it wasn't the same then as it is now. And I do like things better now."

Lorelai sighed and cuddled back against his shoulder. "It might not last, you know."

"Rory and Logan?"

"She might end up back here in the same position she was two years ago. I don't want that to happen, either."

Luke let loose a sigh of his own. "We can't control that."

Lorelai lifted her head up and looked him in the eye. "Oh, come on, Luke. I know you had a definite opinion on the way that part of it was going to go."

"Rory's love life is none of our business," Luke maintained.

"Is that what you told Jess?" Lorelai asked.

"No," Luke admitted. "But it didn't work out, and I'm still responsible for caring about both of them. Logan's a good kid, and he's always going to be in the picture no matter what. I'm not taking sides. Are you?"

"I just want Rory to be happy," Lorelai said. "I wanted her to be better at this than I was at her age."

Luke chuckled. "Didn't we go through this six years ago when Rory and Jess first hooked up? We're not really the best relationship role models."

"But we are, Luke," Lorelai argued. "It may have taken us a while to get there, but we kept it together for a decade and we're married now. We do know what we're doing."

"I know that and you know that, but that doesn't mean that the kids are ready to hear it. We've just got to let it play out."

Lorelai sighed. She knew he was right, but she still worried about Rory – and Rick – getting hurt by the ravages of the highs and lows of Rory's love life. There had been enough emotional ups and downs to get Rory and Logan to a place where they could even deal with each other as prospective parents, and she still worried about the process repeating itself if things didn't work out between them.

"I didn't do enough to make her grow up," she muttered. She turned to Luke again. "Do you think it would have been different if we had done the traditional thing from the beginning?"

"Kids, you mean?"

Lorelai nodded. "Yeah."

Luke groaned. "I thought that topic was retired."

"Luke, it's not –"

"I'm still not crazy about how we'd have to get them at this point," Luke said softly. "But if you wanted to revisit things, I'd consider it."

"I don't want to revisit things," Lorelai told him. "I like where we are right now, with the kids that we have and our grandson. I don't want a baby."

Luke nodded, understanding. "Okay, so what brings up this topic now?"

"I was just thinking that if it had gone differently for us, and we had ended up having kids, that Rory wouldn't have let things spin out of control like she did, "Lorelai attempted to explain. "I knew she needed to mess up a little, but maybe if she knew that she couldn't just come home and have things seem the way that they were when she was a kid that things would have worked out differently."

"Things weren't exactly the same here, though." Luke pointed out. "We already had another kid at home. All of this could have happened when April was in high school and we could have had two out of control kids in the house at the same time."

"I don't think Rory really thought of that as a factor," Lorelai said.

"The same thing could have happened at any time and we wouldn't have been able to help Rory like we did this year," Luke said, reaching out to rub his wife's shoulder. "You're not responsible for how things worked out, Lorelai. None of what happened was your fault. You know it's not."

Lorelai reached for his hand again and gratefully rubbed it between her fingers. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing that remained consistent over the past two years was Luke's never-flagging faith in her.

If she couldn't count on anything else, at least she could count on that. She could always count on that.

"The kids have all melted down at different points," Luke continued. "April put us through a lot when she was a teenager. Jess lost everything and had to come home for a while. It was Rory's turn. I don't think it's going to happen again."

"I hope you're right," Lorelai said.

"Are you thinking more about the kid thing because we're not going to be seeing as much of Rick?" Luke asked. "I mean, even if you don't want to revisit things –"

"Not really," Lorelai said. "I mean, you're right about what happened with April and Jess in the past. Both of them did need us more then." She paused. "Do you think it might have been different for April if we had kids, though? Would there have been less scary boyfriends and impromptu boat stealing?"

"I'm not sure it would have been different in a positive way," Luke remarked. "She might have acted out more if she knew we were already distracted."

"Is she bringing her boyfriend to the cabin tomorrow?" Lorelai asked. "I know she was thinking about it."

Luke grimaced. "He's not coming," he said tersely.

"So much for not having an opinion on your daughter's love life," Lorelai teased him.

"The kid's okay," Luke said. "April's got to be serious about him if she voluntarily introduced him to me. It's just that she's still April. I'm not ready to get used to her boyfriends. I'm not ready to accept that I might like them."

"She's your youngest," Lorelai remarked. "I get it."

"I got used to Logan because I had to," Luke said. "It helped that he proved himself as a dad for almost a year before he took back up with Rory again."

"But you still prefer her to be with Jess," Lorelai suggested.

"It's not that," Luke said. "I guess I just see him being lonely and too much like me before we got together. I don't want him to be like that."

Lorelai raised an eyebrow. "You know, we could be thinking about this all wrong."

Luke looked at her suspiciously. "What do you mean by that?"

Lorelai smirked. "What if this love triangle didn't remain a love triangle? What if they got rid of all of this drama and decided to dedicate themselves to being a throuple?"

"A throuple. Do you mean –"

Lorelai giggled and nodded.

Luke groaned, obviously embarrassed. "This is why I stay out of these things. I know nothing about the world these days."

Lorelai cuddled back against her husband, relishing that she still had the ability to needle him after all these years.

* * *

"MAMA!"

Rick skittered out from underneath Lorelai's grasp and ran the entire length of the pier towards his mother, nearly knocking April to the ground from where she was carefully assembling fishing rods.

Lorelai helped her stepdaughter re-balance herself and then took off after her grandson, but she was no match for a determined toddler. Rory met him halfway and scooped him up in her arms as he threw his sweaty arms around her neck.

"Hey, little man! Mama missed you, too."

Lorelai finally caught up to her daughter, interrupting their reunion to claim one of her own.

"Was he good?" Rory asked as she embraced her mother.

"Mostly," Lorelai replied as she and Rory walked down towards the cabin. "I caught him trying to sneak into the mud baths at the spa once or twice when I wasn't looking, but other than that, nothing beyond the usual was destroyed."

"Perils of having a son, I guess," Rory remarked as they stepped up on the front porch. She twisted as they heard Logan's BMW pull up in the driveway behind them, and Rick immediately wriggled out of her arms and toddled down the steps to greet his father.

"DADDY!"

Logan emerged out of his car with a single duffle bag and embraced his son with his other arm. Scooping up the jubilant boy, he turned around to greet Jess, who was carrying in his bags behind him.

"I guess we can see where I rank," Rory dryly remarked as Jess and Logan walked around to the other side of the cabin to greet Luke, Rick still clutched in Logan's arms.

"Well, it looks like the menfolk have decided to congregate amongst themselves for a bit," Lorelai said as she opened the front door of the cabin and ushered her daughter inside. "Let's get some coffee and have a few moments to ourselves."

"Sounds good," Rory said as she nervously shuffled her bags, following her mother inside the house.

* * *

"So how was it?" Luke asked Jess as they discreetly cleaned the fish that April had caught moments earlier. Lorelai and Rory were having coffee inside of the house while April and Logan chased Rick around in the front yard.

"I guess it went semi-successfully," Jess remarked as he shuffled fish guts into a bucket underneath the table. "I mean, the book looks to be one of our bigger sellers but even considering that, it's probably never going to be a huge success. We'll keep plugging away at it, though. The press is getting a lot more attention from this than we usually do."

"And traveling with Rory?" Luke asked, adroitly cutting up the fish that Jess had just cleaned.

"Separate rooms, if that's what's you're asking," Jess said sharply.

"I was just wondering how you were getting along, considering everything," Luke replied.

"What happened between me and Rory wasn't what you think," Jess told him. "It wasn't a good idea. Not with everything she has going on. We're still friends. We'll still continue to work together. It's not a problem."

"Did she say anything about coming back to Stars Hollow or –"

"I don't know," Jess replied. "That depends on how all –" he gestured in the direction of Logan – "that goes."

Luke nodded. "And you're okay with that?"

"I'm not going to interfere in anybody else's family," Jess told him. "Logan and I are actually friends now. We can act like we did when were 21, or we can be adults. I'd rather be an adult. Besides, I've started talking to Jessica again."

"I thought she moved to Baltimore," Luke remarked, racking his brain for what he thought he remembered of Jess's past girlfriends.

"That's Celeste," Jess corrected him. "That was three years ago, and she's married now. Jessica moved to Pittsburgh, but she's thinking of coming back."

"And you're happy with that?"

"We'll see what happens," Jess remarked noncommittally. "I think we're headed to a good place."

Luke wasn't sure whether he believed him, but it was all he had to go on right now.

For his sake, he hoped that Jess was right.

"So what happens now?" Lorelai asked Rory as they sat at the kitchen table, nursing identical cups of coffee.

"Rick and I are going to stay at Logan's for at least a week," Rory said. "We're going to try to get used to his routine, and he's going to try to get used to ours. If it's something we can live with, I think I'm going to start looking for work in New York."

"And you're just not going to leave, Rory?"

Rory sighed and took another sip of coffee. "You know, before I found out I was pregnant, I was planning to move back to New York anyway. It was home. I wasn't really planning on raising a kid there, but I wasn't planning on coming back to Stars Hollow, either."

"What about that teaching degree you talked about?" Lorelai asked.

"It's always a possibility," Rory replied. "I can get a teaching degree in New York if I still decide to do it."

"I just don't want you to pin your entire future on whether this works out with Logan or not," Lorelai said. "You know, Luke and I are more than willing to help you if you wanted to stay in Connecticut and get a degree here. I don't see why your relationship with him needs to rely on whether you're in the same city or not."

"It's not really –" Rory began. She stopped and took a breath. "I want to see how we work as a family. If it's something that can maybe work, then I can figure out the best way to make that work."

"So he's not pushing you to do this?" Lorelai asked softly.

"He's not," Rory replied. "We can't really date again, Mom. It's too late for that. I've kept wanting it to be like it was when we lived together before, and – I can't make myself feel that way. He's not a Huntzberger heir anymore, but it's also not the life I lived before all of this. I don't know what it's going to be like. I'd like a chance to find out, though."

Lorelai frowned, remembering what Rory had confessed to her in the early stages of her pregnancy when she was adamant that Logan not get any sort of impression that Rory wanted a romantic relationship with him. She had said that she didn't know if she had actually loved him or became involved with him because she was too confused about the rest of her life unraveling.

It seemed that Rory still didn't know. Only now she was being motivated not by uncertainty and hopelessness, but by the sincere motivation to provide a good life for her child.

It was the same reason that Lorelai's parents had wanted her to marry Rory's father all those years ago.

"How do you feel about him?" Lorelai asked her daughter.

Rory sighed. "Logan's a great dad," she said. "He gave up a lot to be there for us, and he's been really supportive ever since Rick was born. I could see us really having a great life."

"You're evading the question," Lorelai said.

"I don't feel about him the way I used to," Rory replied. "I can't feel about him the way I did when I was running to him to get away from the things I didn't want to think about. I don't know if it's because we're older, or because our lives are different, or if it's because I just haven't been with him in that way in a while. I need a little time to figure all that stuff out."

"I appreciate that, Rory," Lorelai told her. "I know you want to do the best thing for your kid, but if you're unhappy in this relationship, then Logan is unhappy and so is Rick. I don't want you to commit to this unless you know for sure."

"I'm not making any sudden decisions, Mom," Rory assured her. "I promise."

Lorelai smiled. "Good."

"You'll still get to see both of us all the time, no matter what happens," Rory said. "You and Luke have done so much for us ever since I found out I was pregnant. But I need to kind of get out there and see what our next step is. We need to –"

"You need your independence," Lorelai said.

"I guess we kind of do," Rory admitted.

Lorelai understood that more than Rory would ever know.

* * *

"It seems pretty copacetic over there," Lorelai whispered to Luke later that night, feeling the last vestiges of wine overtake her sleepy limbs.

Luke looked over to the next table, where Rory, April, Logan, and Jess were laughing as they consumed the last of the remaining bottle of wine. They were supposedly in the middle of some sort of card game, but only April seemed to be paying any sort of attention to it. The salmon had been prepared and consumed, the wine bottles had been emptied, and the only thing left to do was to drag themselves and the dozing toddler asleep on Luke's lap off to bed while the kids talked late into the night.

"I think things are going to be okay," Luke told his wife. "Whatever happens between Rory and either of them, they'll stay close." He shrugged. "Maybe it doesn't matter."

"I think you were right before," Lorelai told him, playing with the hairs on the back of his neck. "They'll always be our family, but it's time for them to not be so tethered to us."

Luke turned to gaze at his wife, her eyes only slightly tinged with sadness. "It might be more of just you and me at this point," he said gently.

Lorelai ran her fingers over the front of his stubble, thinking of everything that had come to her life since the morning she married Luke and Rory had announced she was pregnant. Alf of these different, shuffling parts had finally come together to form a complete whole. It wasn't a whole that she had known that she had wanted – or missed – until she finally had it. That whole was her life – her full, rich, wonderful life – that existed regardless of the physical presence of the people contained within it.

Except for the pulsing heart that beat beneath all of it. The one whose ring matched hers.

She still needed his presence more than anything.

"I'll be more than okay with that," Lorelai told her husband.


End file.
